Stained Glass
by Sir Serendipity
Summary: Post-VOTDT one-shot. Edmund struggles with leaving Narnia for the last time. And, finally, he discovers who Aslan is in his world: the man in the stained glass window.


**A/N:** Sorry, I keep disappearing and then switching fandoms. :'D I still write all sorts of things for my old ones, I just don't get around to finishing and/or publishing them...

Anyhoo, this is basically about how people refer to and even practise Christianity as a religion although Christianity itself _discourages_ empty religion in favour of a personal relationship with Christ. Not particularly biased towards books or films.

**UPDATE:** In response to the reviewer "dorcas" who didn't quite get my message: this story isn't about what you think it is, and I've made a post on my Edmund RP blog in reply to your review. It can be found at the link on my profile. Anyone else who thinks this is bashing the Church or Christianity should check that out as well.

* * *

It took Edmund months to figure out that Aslan was the man in the stained glass window.

It was his thirteenth birthday, and Alberta, whom Edmund still stubbornly called "Auntie" just to spite her, had bought him a campus tour of Kings College. Lucy couldn't come: Alberta was already being so generous to them just by taking them in, and she wasn't obligated to buy him a present at all—Edmund heard a lot about this in his final days of being twelve—and besides, Harold had gruffly put in, your brother's a young man now; he doesn't want to drag his sister around with him everywhere he goes. Edmund did, rather. He liked Lucy, felt very little like a man, and still didn't quite trust Eustace not to drive her mad over the course of the afternoon. But Edmund knew better than to try to argue with Harold. He generally found himself shouting at a newspaper.

So he went, strolling along the streets of Cambridge and feeling as ephemeral as always. Kings College didn't help. He usually liked big echoey places, but in his current mood he just felt small and rather echoey himself. He had left pieces of something in Narnia, scattered from the fragrant woods of the Western March to the shining expanse of the Eastern Sea, and he was beginning to think it was his heart.

A continental tourist, looking right over his head, walked into him, cooed an apology, and ruffled his hair. He was barely there, like a ghost of a king in a child's body.

Like a stained glass window.

"Who's the man in the window, ma'am?" he asked the tour guide, who looked put-out at the question. Edmund suspected that she may have already answered it while he wasn't listening.

"That one's Henry VI. Here's St. Peter, and we believe this one is the Christ."

The image's head was cocked to one side, a little too far to be natural. Thick lines of lead interrupted the flow of its robes. One hand was raised in a halfhearted blessing. Its face was beautifully rendered but unremarkable and unsmiling, gazing back at the tourists as blandly as they blinked up at it.

_ No, _thought Edmund as everything fell into place.

His Aslan was not a bored, condescending face in cold stained glass, not sleepy sermons in mildewy churches. His Aslan was half Lion and half liquid light, beautiful and terrible, with power in His every sinew and joy spilling from His great tawny eyes.

Edmund had never known love until the time he had dropped to his skinned knees on the wet grass and buried his face in that warm mane—the first warmth he had felt in days—and cried for everything he had done, cried until he was weak and shaking from the most beautiful kind of broken heart. Aslan hadn't needed words. He had waited until Edmund was finished and then passed His rough tongue over his face, washing away blood and tears and sins alike in a way no dribble of holy water on his forehead ever could have.

And on those days when he felt like Susan's bowstring, gradually stretched taut by a slew of everyday annoyances until he could almost feel the barbed words stinging the backs of his lips, the halls would ring with Lucy's clear voice calling out, "Romp!" Suddenly the words were gone, the bowstring released with a harmless_twang_. Edmund's world became a tangle of his brother and sisters clinging to Aslan as He rolled about like a half-tonne kitten, batting at His kings and queens with velveted paws as if they were balls of string.

How could anyone settle for mechanically reciting scripted prayers to the man in the stained glass window when joy and love and adventure beyond imagining were calling?

_ This is the very reason you were brought to Narnia._

The tour group had long since moved on without him. The warm light of a late August afternoon streamed onto his face through the image of the Christ, dappling the flagstones in shades of gold. Edmund longed to smash the glass, to rip out the lead casement and let that light come pouring into the stale interior of the chapel. What a satisfying smash it would make, too, shaking through to the very foundations of the building, reverberating around the vaulted ceiling like a lion's roar.


End file.
